Ethanol's
Water ShortageOctober 17, 2007; Page A18

If the Senate's new "renewable fuels"
mandate becomes law, get ready for a giant slurping sound as Midwest
water supplies are siphoned off to slake Big Ethanol. House and
Senate negotiators are preparing for an energy-bill conference, and
if the Senate's language prevails, America's economy will be forced
to consume more than five times current ethanol production.

Heavily subsidized and absurdly inefficient,
corn-based ethanol has already driven up food prices. But the
Senate's plan to increase production to 36 billion gallons by 2022,
from less than seven billion today, will place even greater pressure
on farm-belt aquifers.

Ethanol plants consume roughly four gallons of
water to produce each gallon of fuel, but that's only a fraction of
ethanol's total water habit. Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel
says that when you count the water needed to grow the corn, one
gallon of ethanol requires a staggering 1,700 gallons of H2O. Backers
of the Senate bill say that less-thirsty technologies are just around
the corner, which is what we've been hearing for years.

Some corn-producing regions are already scrapping
over dwindling supply. The Journal's Joe Barrett recently reported
that Kansas is threatening to sue neighboring Nebraska for consuming
more than its share of the Republican River. The Grand Forks Herald
reports local opposition to a proposed ethanol plant in Erskine,
Minnesota, with anti-refinery yard signs sprouting up and residents
concerned about well water. Backers of a proposed plant in Jamestown,
North Dakota, recently withdrew their application when it became
clear that the plant's million-gallon-a-day appetite would drain too
much from a local aquifer. In Wisconsin, new ethanol plants are
encountering opposition in Sparta and Milton.

"There are going to be conflicts," says
Iowa State hydrogeologist Bill Simpkins, "and there are going to
be lawsuits." Even in Iowa, which enjoys abundant rainfall,
there are no guarantees that supply can meet the new demand. "The
problem is we don't know enough about some of these areas to say
whether people can pump out a lot more water," Mr. Simpkins
says.

The political fights could get ugly, because
plants tend to pop up near cities, not necessarily near the biggest
water supplies. Ethanol needs a rail system to be distributed, and
ethanol factories save money on boiler maintenance when they get the
same kind of high-quality water that humans prefer. In states like
Iowa, where ethanol plants are considered agricultural projects
deserving of preferential treatment, ethanol can also muscle out
other business uses.

Ethanol's big environmental footprint is not
limited to water, because biofuels like ethanol are highly
inefficient. In September, the Chairman of the OECD's Roundtable on
Sustainable Development released a report entitled, "Biofuels:
Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?" Authors Richard Doornbosch
and Ronald Steenblik compared the power density of different energy
sources, measured in energy production per unit of the earth's area.
Oil -- because it requires only a narrow hole in the earth and is
extracted as a highly concentrated form of energy -- is up to 1,000
times more efficient than solar energy, which requires large panels
collecting a less-concentrated form of energy known as the midday
sun.

But even solar power is roughly 10 times as
efficient as biomass-derived fuels like ethanol. In other words,
growing the corn to produce ethanol means clearing land and killing
animals on a massive scale, or converting land from food production
to fuel production. Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institute says that
the best-case scenario promoted by ethanol cheerleaders will actually
cause the greatest environmental disaster. If people can actually
refine cheap, low-maintenance production techniques that don't
require huge water supplies, Mr. Huber predicts a world-wide leveling
of forestland as farmers turn vegetation into fuel.

Writing in Science magazine, Renton Righelato and
Dominick Spracklen estimate that in order to replace just 10% of
gasoline and diesel consumption, the U.S. would need to convert a
full 43% of its cropland to ethanol production. The alternative
approach -- clearing wilderness -- would mean more greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere than simply sticking with gasoline, because the
CO2-munching trees cut down to make way for King Ethanol absorb more
emissions than ethanol saves.

Slowly but surely, these problems are beginning to
alert public opinion to the huge costs of force-feeding corn ethanol
as an energy savior. The ethanol lobby is still hoping it can keep
all of this under wraps long enough to shove one more big mandate
through Congress, but the Members need to know the problems they'll
be creating. We hope that House conferees, who did not include a new
mandate in their energy bill, insist that any final bill is
ethanol-free.